Real love -- I'm, like, searchin' for that Queer Love -- LGBTQIA+ Love // A Thread for the Real Ones

new contrapoints video dropped and i complained about another fucking three hour breadtube video and then i watched the whole thing anyway, because i was interested in the topic, which was Twilight. well no of course it wasn't, it was about who tops, but since youtube wants to be the disney channel you can't just do a video about that. and i watched it because when it comes to trans women, the answer is nobody, nobody wants to fucking top, and watching her video about it helps me process my own feelings about that.

for me intimacy isn't a physical act, it's an emotional act that's expressed physically. that's probably the biggest part of why i don't cum with partners. contrapoints talks about some of this, talks about women feeling selfish about asking our partners to spend the time it takes to get us to cum. the guy who's the worst lover in the world and then asks "did u cum" is definitely A Thing. because that's the thing if someone spends all that time and then i don't cum _anyway_ my partner's gonna feel like they failed. even though they didn't fail. not cumming is frustrating but it doesn't mean i didn't get anything out of it personally.

i need to feel a certain way in order to cum, be in a certain headspace, and i have a difficult enough time getting _myself_ to that headspace. and that certain way is, i mean, _taken_. i'm not actually that interested in being taken physically. it's more the feeling of _inevitability_, of not having a choice in the matter. i'd love to be able to _choose_ to cum, just be like "oh i feel like cumming now" and then cum, but it's never really worked like that for me.

with a partner that's inseparable from the feeling of being desired. that's the complicated thing. a lot of me only cumming by myself is _desiring myself_. that's something contrapoints talks about. contrapoints argues against the idea that woman = femme = submissive = receptive, argues that it's one of those social constructs. and kind of? when i present femme i feel desirable in a way i don't when i present butch. feeling desirable, for me, means feeling like prey. the idea that someone wants me enough to just... take me. that's important.

at the same time there's an aspect of, like, self-esteem to that. i've definitely been guilty of substituting being loved by others for loving myself. sexually, though, there's a taboo against wanting yourself. you're not _supposed_ to want yourself. it gets stigmatized. whether that gets called "asexual" or "autosexual" or whatever. since i first had sex i've felt like there's something _wrong_ with me for not cumming with a partner, for only cumming by myself. emotionally, though, wanting myself is kind of fundamental to healthy relationships. and sex for me is emotional. so it seems kind of fucked. "i'd do me" feels healthier to me than judging my self-worth based on whether someone who i _want_ to do me would do me.

the thing is that there's a lot more to intimacy than cumming. i need to do stuff with a partner, and that need has nothing whatsoever to do with my need to cum. this interests me because when i was running on T, the two were _extremely_ closely linked, but now they're not. sometimes i need someone to come over and tie me up because i need _intimacy_ with other people. that doesn't have to be people with whom i'm romantically involved but it has to be someone who i feel comfortable talking about my feelings with. like talking about my feelings with someone else... it is good, it helps me feel closer to them. sometimes i need to share my feelings with someone else by _doing_ something with them. this book i'm reading, _somatics for rope bottoms_, talks about rope as a medium of communication, and i feel that. physical intimacy is a medium of communication for me, a somatic medium of communication.

with kink for me, top/bottom, dom/sub, obviously that's an unequal relationship. that doesn't bother me because in a larger sense in a healthy kink relationship there's an idea of equity. that in intimate terms both partners get what they need. and i guess for me that's where the "top shortage" comes in. there's not, in fact, a shortage of tops. the world is lousy with "big dick daddy doms". i just have a hard time finding tops i can _trust_ to respect my boundaries. even that... my real problem is that i have a hard time finding _partners_ i can trust to respect my boundaries. i've been hurt a lot more by subs not respecting my emotional boundaries as a dom than by tops not respecting my emotional boundaries as a bottom. and i experience a lot of this from the right side of the slash. i've had to spend a couple of months convincing my girlfriend that i will respect her boundaries, in large part because her other girlfriend doesn't. she feels pressured and responsible to meet the sexual and kink needs of _both_ her girlfriends, which is a totally unfair expectation and has led her to withdraw completely from intimacy.

writing it out, i guess, the "top shortage" is less about people not _wanting_ to top and more... bottoms who are still learning to take responsibility for their own submission. i want to be taken. i'm afraid of being hurt, but not in a way that keeps me from taking responsibility for my own desire. not everyone on the right side of the slash is willing or able to do that, i guess.

Paragraphs 3 to 5 of your last post are very relatable, kate.

at the same time there's an aspect of, like, self-esteem to that. i've definitely been guilty of substituting being loved by others for loving myself.

well, let me put it this way

if i don't want to fuck myself, who will want to fuck me?
and wanting only to fuck myself, who am i?
and if not now, when?

Swen feel free to share any pro balance tips ;) likewise a lot of stuff that has been swirling around "in the cloud" for 5 years-ish just coming into focus

that doesn't have to be people with whom i'm romantically involved but it has to be someone who i feel comfortable talking about my feelings with.

yeah same, sex is a super vulnerable. i wish i could be someone who can just collide with a total stranger i think it would be fun but i guess sex is kinda scary to me and i need to establish trust

also,

my partner is always putting me first. it's going to sound weird to say this but i've had to learn to love it. because i always felt like he gets an ego benefit out of putting others first. so i've had to be like, so what. and suddenly not caring about that makes it apparent that he does it out of genuine care for others

aww <3

now that I like myself, the path is clearer for others to like me as much as I like them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqsQZAP2imA

i mean let's not be crazy - i'm never gonna lead the line for the sane and well nourished

but if i had to summon one nugget, i would say - life is messy, get with it or you're fucked <3

yeah same, sex is a super vulnerable. i wish i could be someone who can just collide with a total stranger i think it would be fun but i guess sex is kinda scary to me and i need to establish trust

― Swen, Sunday, March 3, 2024 1:15 AM (five hours ago)

yeah. if anything, even moreso for me, someone for whom being _taken_ is important

a friend just posted a meme of, it doesn't have a title, but it's a submission triangle, three different types. housecat, doll, doe. i look at this and instantly i know i'm a doe:

- weakness/helplessness
- fragility
- struggling & losing
- not thinking (ohgodohgodohgod)

i'm not a "bottom", i'm _prey_. that's what i _need_. which hunter do i let catch me? when do i stop running? i feel like i've been running for a really long time now.

i've been having this long-running... discussion? debate? conflict? with this... person. we both read these stories and he doesn't like the endings. he doesn't like the things the protagonists... they surrender to men who don't _deserve_ them. the protagonists deserve better, and they don't get it. they choose to give up. my read on it is that he reads these stories and he says "i'd be a better keeper than that". well ok but he _could_ try. he could, i'd let him. i'd trust him to win. he's just afraid to win. "lesbian sheep syndrome". ewes show interest by _standing still_ and letting the ram take them. the ones i trust have such a hard time trusting themselves to take the initiative. i'm as blunt as possible about it. if i go too far i stop feeling like prey, you know?

and yes, that situation is queer. i'm someone who rounds off to "woman" and i want someone who rounds off to "man", but i want him in a queer way. everything i do is queer.

the guys i want are the ones who act like lesbians. and then i complain when they come out to me as transfem on the third date.

WHEN DID I POST THAT QUOTE, KATE I DON'T THINK THAT WAS ME, UNLESS I JUST EXPERIENCED ANOTHER DISSOCIATIVE FUGUE I HONESTLY DO NOT THINK I POSTED THOSE WORDS, please let me know because if I am doing things without remembering them I should honestly talk to my doctor

omg like did someone log into my account and post about sex

sorry i quoted wrong, that was deflatormouse

omg that was terrifying, I've actually been through a dissociative fugue before where I forgot who I was lol and combined with my recent episode of sex amnesia the clarification is most appreciated, thank you Kate ❤️

sorry my goof freaked you out, my bad!

omg you're fine, also to be clear I also have high anxiety around sex and am a vulnerable fucker from the start 😎🤟

for your consideration, a new term for 'bussy':

he/him hoo-hah

i've been reading about fictional depictions of gay sex

for instance, just the other day i learned about the "yaoi hole", which is a fuckhole that's not a penis or an anus

but it's not a vag apparently because a boy fucking another boy in his vag wouldn't be gay enough

the wikipedia diagram of a yaoi hole is adorable btw

i appreciate it so much that i went to look at what other drawings 狄の用務員 did for wikipedia

not really sure what the difference between an otoko-futanari and a guy with a yaoi hole is, but author has a drawing depicting "special bodies in japanese _fictional_ works"

狄の用務員 also made a chart titled TOILET_MEAL_SOCIAL_RESERCH

some youngsters were also explaining to me about the Omegaverse, which is apparently a thing that started in Supernatural fanfiction

i don't know much about Supernatural but its fans kind of remind me of Sonic the Hedgehog fans

it seems to mostly be a lot of queer mpreg stuff with the extra bonus of eugenics

i'm really unhappy with queer teenagers going in on the eugenics. like if you want your characters to fuck like animals and to have, like, penis knots or whatever, that's fine, but this "alpha/beta/omega" shit is cringe

best i can figure the only way they can justify wanting to fuck a conservative is if they are literally biologically compelled to

i can understand having complicated feelings about being queer and wanting to get bred by a conservative but jesus god i wish they'd cut it out about the eugenics shit

Oof. A side effect of being back in the manic creative place that has me writing/working in studio for days on end is that the occasional deathly depressive lows are making a comeback. Spend the hours of 4-6am this morning chain smoking and wanting to die. I feel kinda ok this morning but the dark moments are really scary!!

Ofc Kate you’re interesting in taxonomizing the sexual organs of futanari haha, I love that.

<3 <3 hang in there, i know those manic/creative/death/chain-smoking days well. glad you're posting. remember medicine, and voice on voice contact.

Ofc Kate you’re interesting in taxonomizing the sexual organs of futanari haha, I love that.

― a hyperlink to the past (flamboyant goon tie included)

it doesn't get talked about much but there are people out there who have what's called "penile preserving vaginoplasty". i wouldn't call any of them "futanari" though, i suspect they'd probably find that term offensive. i don't really know much about how things work from the transmasc side, if someone has a metoidoplasty or a phalloplasty.

TOILET_MEAL_SOCIAL_RESERCH

my new grindcore band name

eugenics = gross, silly, false, dumb. considering the global atmosphere and events of the last 20 years it doesn't not not compute for me as to why young people are drawn to it though.

fgti i'm hoping more lightness comes your way soon.

so i'm watching a video on ADHD and they're talking about people getting distracted and not being able to cum, and like wait, is not being able to cum from sex an ADHD thing? god that would be a trip

lol that reminds me of my #1. he's always getting distracted. doesn't seem to have as much of a problem cumming from watching porn though. me, i haven't watched porn in months. it's harder to watch free porn now then it was 10 years ago, that's fucked up.

doesn't not not compute

lol, one too many negatives (i think)

lol

I tried some porn today for the first time in months. Nah! Didn’t work!

i can't watch it alone, i need it to be like a thing. i'm like, partner or bust. like what am i an obelisk. no, i'm not. i'm a person. people go together.

catching up
haha, i think anyone would be horrified to have my words attributed to them Swen 🤣

i'm not a "bottom", i'm _prey_.

ughh yeah
had an incident recently where i was "hunted"
i just froze, didn't scream for help, didn't try to fight the guy off. smiled and nodded, gave agreeable one word answers. he turned a corner, there were too many people, he freaked and fled. nbd, it might have been, but nbd- the worst thing is i blame myself for being so passive, and so does everyone else. but i think about, like, if i had tried to scream no sound would come out.

isn't it completely different, when sweet boys who care about my well being try to entice me very gently to have sex with them? obviously it is, but in a certain way i guess not?

he/him hoo-hah

got y'all in check
sorry

i don't like porn

me neither

haha, i think anyone would be horrified to have my words attributed to them Swen 🤣

lies

that sounds scary deflatormouse! have been in situations like that before myself, never fun

not a big fan of porn either tbh. remembering i once had a boring grindr hookup where the guy insisted on putting on porn on his tv while we did it, which i found more annoying than anything. like hey i'm literally right here

I don't get music during sex for the same reason

listen, don't get me started on lights

i will go full on art deco if it means a better angle but next thing you know someone's flipping on the stage light to find a towel - CALM THE F DOWN

i did NOT ask for the set designer, i just want a soft beige glow, let's be real

I love porn so much that I have a porn collection. (Mostly vintage VHS and Super 8 reels along with some smutty mags from the 60s and 70s)

i used to be horrified by any kind of scene-setting theatrical flourishes but i've realized that i do like certain things. firelight (lol i mean candlelight, i'm not lighting fires in my house wtf, but maybe some day i'll like set up a divan next to a firepit, with uhh bug neeting over everything????). and then with music, i like jacking off to really butch doom metal lmao. i've had very good sex with stars of the lid playing in the other room. 99% of video porn bores me. i could see a slideshow of vintage bear stills working nicely, kind of setting the mood but not demanding too much attention. but all of that is no longer at my fingertips (rip tumblr).

Rofl Swen

are there analog porn snobs?

xp

it all has to be incidental for me. music playing in the other room could be fine if it's not something i'm very connected to. lighting ordinaire plz.

absolutely.

there’s a section of an old essay being published for the first time this week where i describe the first time I came to music playing— it was Behead the Prophet No Lord Shall Live’s “In the Garden.” I was 13.

it all has to be incidental for me.

Exactly. I'm creeped out by a dude wasting time flipping through files or vinyl for the correct seduct-o-sleaze.

definitely have had some really crazy sex to music— Ravedeath 1972, an album by Fall of Efrafa, Old Apparatus. I also once had sex with a stranger during a Scissor Sisters concert lmfao, sorry, yall got me going and now I can’t stop thinking of all the music I have ever had sex to.

As far as porn, I get why people don’t like it or use it, but I find it interesting both culturally and carnally. I could write a book about porn, to be honest. Maybe I should.

_it all has to be incidental for me._

Exactly. I'm creeped out by a dude wasting time flipping through files or vinyl for the correct seduct-o-sleaze.

it's not like we're playing smooth jazz folks come on it can be cool, jeez, i've set many a good scene and i'm proud of it. better than going to a guy's house who lays down a flat sheet on top of he and his husband's Egyptian hand painted bed covers.

i'd play the bangles 'walk like an egyptian' on my phone

should say i do have time for vintage porn, mostly from a cultural/historical vantage point

when my first bf and i were dating, early on in the relationship, he had his music library on shuffle in the background while we were mid-coitus and at one point that eve 6 graduation song came on and we both stopped what we were doing and burst out laughing in unison

i'm not 100% anti-intentional mood music - i may have done it once or twice with some recent flings - but i am pretty picky about it

rendezvous then i'm through with you

that's so funny donna

yeah i mean i dunno what to tell you, i've come to know my proclivities so well i wish i could like draw in police chalk on the bed to demonstrate where i'm going to be happy, yaknow, like let's maximize this impact

basically i grew up on porn but only, like, a _very specific subset_

not force feminization oddly enough. the stuff i am into is however _very_ subtextually linked to my transness. that's not really obvious on a surface level - if anything it tends to get seen as extremely cishet and patriarchal - but when one starts digging into it there's a _ton_ of trans shit in there.

sometimes i worry that the porn ruined my ability to enjoy myself with a partner, that i developed interests so specific i might as well have become a british scholar

my fetishes aren't _practical_, is the thing. i mean not impractical in the same sense that mpreg is, admittedly. still, "gee, i wish i could be thrown in a basement in chains and made to drink from a dog bowl for a week" is pretty impractical. (i actually saw a great meme yesterday where someone was talking about having that fantasy because they didn't want to make a phone call, which i found _very relatable_.) for one thing, none of the houses around here have basements. for another, who the fuck _owns a house_ these days? most damningly, even if i did somehow happen to get tied up in a basement for a week, i'd still probably still have to make that fucking phone call when i got out. part of me suspects that a _lot_ of ND fetishes are based around anything that will let them avoid making phone calls.

i've seen memes blaming the younger generations' inability to cum on these extremely specific fetishes, and it's _probably_ some "avocado toast" bullshit? but i don't know for sure.

the main thing is that i was absolutely never interested in penetrative sex. that was i liked about porn, there was so much porn _without sex_ in it. i feel like i have basically the same, like... physical desires as anybody, and i guess for a lot of people it's natural and intuitive what to do with it. it wasn't ever for me. even masturbation, i had no idea what that was or how to do that. basically i kind of stumbled on it by accident, fairly late into adolescence. i still don't know that i ever did it "right". it wasn't a pleasant discovery. honestly i spent a lot of time "edging", actively trying to avoid orgasm. maybe that's why i have so much difficulty. or maybe it was the antidepressants. i don't know. anyway, now that i don't have genital dysphoria it doesn't feel _wrong_ the way it did before, but it doesn't happen any more easily.

i have had multiples. the weird thing about multiples is that when people talk about them they talk about it as if it happens serially? and i don't experience it like that, for me, i have, like, multiples at the same time. like i'll be in the middle of one and another one will start up. it's pretty disconcerting and awkward and having two orgasms at once isn't really any better than just having one. i'd rather just be able to have them serially.

porn is different, like... i find that i'm interested in different things. the whole thing about "audio porn". when i was on T i reacted a lot more strongly to visual stimuli, and on E i'm way more sensitive to audio stimuli. it's the sense of _time_ that's the challenging thing. again maybe it's the ADHD thing. i'm supposed to follow along with something linearly, use my imagination linearly, and i drift off, i go in different directions. i can't focus on one idea long enough for it to reach a conclusion. same reason i don't like music during sex. i'd just listen to the music and lose interest in the sex. it's not that sex is _boring_ per se, it's just that i get easily distracted.

had an incident recently where i was "hunted"
i just froze, didn't scream for help, didn't try to fight the guy off. smiled and nodded, gave agreeable one word answers. he turned a corner, there were too many people, he freaked and fled. nbd, it might have been, but nbd- the worst thing is i blame myself for being so passive, and so does everyone else. but i think about, like, if i had tried to scream no sound would come out.

― A street taco cart named Des'ree (Deflatormouse)

no the thing is that's literally what i'm into, literally what i _want_. that's kinda why that contrapoints video was interesting... it's dangerous to say something like that, that i _want_ to be hunted, that i'm into the whole skatt bros "walk the night" thing (incidentally i heard somewhere that the skatt bros were marketed as "the straight village people" and i can't understand that, how did _anyone anywhere_ interpret that song as _heterosexual_), because people will think it's open season on me, and it's not. i want more than anything else to be hunted, but i got the right to determine who gets a hunting license. that's what these creeps don't get.

are there analog porn snobs?

xp

― A street taco cart named Des'ree (Deflatormouse)

i am _absolutely_ an analog porn snob. not in a sh.tv sense, but in the sense that porn is about _atmosphere_, and that atmosphere is very dependent on the material conditions under which that porn is produced. i also have kind of an autistic taxonomy thing for vintage porn, and i am greatly disappointed that niche porn doesn't tend to get properly archived. you do have some folks like vinegar syndrome who do a lot of work with some of the vintage stuff, but there's _so much_ out there that the best you'll get is these kind of haphazard, poorly converted _something weird_ digitizations. just as an example you can look at, like, irving and paula klaw's work, movie star news and so forth. pretty well-known, mostly for the couple things they did with bettie page, but they did _way_ more than just that. a whole lot of different things. all the negatives were destroyed in a panic when law enforcement started coming after them, but there's no catalog of what still exists in terms of, like, prints. just random pictures. like the original media isn't so important to me, it's more the artifacts of their production.

one of my favorite things about porn is the non-porn aspects of it. the stuff that kind of reflects the circumstances under which it was made. shag carpeting. a tv in the background playing "all my children". hotel rooms of the early 1980s. it's not just a physical act, it's the _setting_. contemporary porn? shit, i could do that myself. for me there's always been something of _nostalgia_ in porn, or maybe retrofuturism. the relationship of _time_ (or the lack thereof) and _causality_ to porn, that's what interests me. i have had fantasies that are kind of like porn equivalents of "ubik", the way these ideas manifest themselves in different time periods.

like i said. my fantasies aren't always very practical.

i also really love the non-porn aspects of vintage porn. there's something so delicious about seeing evidence of lives that are halfway between mundane and glamorous.

and god those 80s motel rooms, i just want to live in that world sometimes